Florida Straits (28 page)

"Maybe a visor?" offered Zack.

Bert shrugged. "What the hell, I just keep
him dim places. He don't like the heat anyway. Heat like dehydrates
him, gives him kidney stones. The way he whimpers when he passes
one ..." Bert shuddered. "But hey, enough about the stupid dog.
Joey, you gonna gimme a glassa wine or what?"

Joey stalled an extra few seconds getting
the Shirt his drink. He wasn't used to parties, to so many people
at once, so much to figure out. It made him a little dizzy.

When he came back, he noticed something
different about Sandra. She was smiling a more thorough smile than
he usually saw. Her green eyes crinkled at the corners, it was like
enjoyment was seeping in everywhere. It seemed to Joey that she had
never looked prettier or happier. She had friends, vegetables,
plates that matched; the man she loved was not off doing something
shady or dangerous; she was at ease.

Joey studied. He wanted to see how people
acted at a dinner party, what they talked about, if there was a
code for what you did or didn't say. The women talked about the
bank, about some new system for closing out the cash count at the
end of the day. Zack asked Bert about the Paradiso; he was
interested in the real estate angle.

There was a sound of cascading water as
Steve the naked landlord got out of the pool. People tried not to
notice the flash of crotch before he wrapped his towel around him
and said goodnight. Joey went inside to fetch more drinks.

When he returned, Bert was holding forth
about the old days in New York. "Fifty-second Street," he was
saying. "The jazz clubs. Beautiful. Three, four inna morning you
could walk downa street. There was no drugs, no crime. It was
perfectly safe."

As if conjured up by the mention of music,
Luke the reggae player at that moment stepped out of his front
door. He'd put his hair in dreadlocks, and his guitar was strapped
across his back. Lucy the beautiful Fed followed him out. She'd
done her eyes up big and looked like Cleopatra.

After they had passed, Claire said, "Jeez,
you guys live, like, an interesting lifestyle here."

Joey hadn't thought about it quite that way
before, but now that she mentioned it, he supposed they did. Very
Key West. Extremely Key West. Feeling proud, he got up and lit the
gas grill, then took a moment to look at the first star that had
popped through the deepening sky. He filled glasses one more time,
then went to the kitchen for the mountain of steaks.

Zack Davidson, who knew the protocol of
cookouts, joined him at the grill. It was part of a guest's
responsibility, part of the ceremony, this manly convocation around
the fire and the meat. "This is nice," Zack said, with a small but
enveloping gesture that took in the compound, the weather, the
heavens.

Joey nodded. "Nice we're getting together
outsida work."

"Away from Duval Street. The fucking
zoo."

Joey stabbed a filet mignon, slapped it onto
the grill, then realized, a beat later than a more practiced host
would have, that he now had the opportunity he was waiting for, the
opening that the whole evening had been set up to afford. It was
strange, he reflected. He used to imagine that crime was easy and
legitimate enterprise was hard. But just the opposite was true,
because the whole world was set up to thwart the one and lubricate
the other. Joey used to have to slip twenties, sometimes hundreds,
to limping cross-eyed numbers runners from Catholic school to set
up meetings that might advance his criminal career; but here in the
legit world such meetings simply happened, around the barbecue,
around the table, even, no doubt, around urinals at the office.

"Zack," he said, above the companionable
crackle of burning fat, "I wantcha to know I really appreciate the
way ya hung in there with me when I had, ya know, this personal
bullshit that needed taking care of."

Zack waved the gratitude away, but Joey
continued without a pause.

"And I remember you promised that you'd let
me make it up to ya."

Zack said nothing, as if he assumed that
Joey meant the dinner party was by way of thank-you.

Joey fiddled with the steaks. "So Zack, I'd
like to give you a quarter-million dollars."

Zack was swallowing some wine, and he took
an extra second to make sure it went down. Joey did not sound like
he was kidding. He did not sound like he was drunk. Zack couldn't
even stammer, but just stood there with his throat closed tight,
Valpolicella pooling on either side of the constriction.

"There's just one more little thing I need
you to do for me," Joey resumed, "and if that works out, we're
in."

Zack still could not speak, and there was
growing in him the heady and not totally unpleasant conviction that
whatever Joey was talking about, it could not possibly be legal.
The odd satisfaction Zack took from this made him wonder if maybe
he
was drunk; it made him wonder, too, if maybe he'd known
all along that Joey was a desperado, and if it was this whiff of
the outlaw that had drawn Zack to him.

"You're serious?" Zack choked out at
last.

"Serious as diabetes," said Joey.

"Wha'do I gotta do?" As Joey had been
groping for a toehold in normalcy, so Zack in that moment was
getting on terms with the possibility of crime, and it was as if
the boundary between their two positions was nothing more dramatic
than a faint chalk line dabbed on rotting boards.

Joey poked a filet. "Set up a meeting with
Clem Sanders and, ya know, sort of ease the way with him."

Zack shifted his feet, looked up at the sky.
He was relieved yet somehow let down that he was not being asked to
drive a getaway car or carry a satchel through a border check.
"That's all?"

Joey flipped a steak, admired the grill
lines etched across it, and nodded.

"Joey," said Zack, "I talk to Clem all the
time. You don't have to pay me to talk to Clem."

"This is business."

Zack sipped some wine and found himself at a
loss once more. Unlike Joey, he was unaccustomed to feeling out of
his depth. He didn't improvise as well, couldn't fall in with a new
cadence quite as readily.

Joey peeked at the underside of a filet,
then looked toward the little group sitting by the pool. Bert, he
noticed, had given Claire the high honor of holding Don Giovanni in
her lap. "Sandra," Joey hollered over, "you ready with the salad
and the broccoli?"

She waved yes, and jogged with her small
neat steps toward the kitchen.

Zack cleared his throat. "This thing you
wanna talk to Clem about," he said. "Is it, ya know, against the
law?"

"I'm not really sure," said Joey, heaping
the steaks onto the platter. Zack could only admire his blitheness,
his certainty that it was not worth overcooking a filet mignon to
discuss a mere question of legality. "That's one of the things we
have to talk to him about."

Zack nodded, and Sandra bustled by with a
salad bowl you could've bathed a baby in. Then she made a second
pass with an avalanche of broccoli. Joey turned off the grill. "So
you'll do it?" he said to Zack.

"Sure," Zack said. "But it's really not
worth—"

Joey dropped his voice another notch to cut
him off. "And lemme ask ya one more thing, while we're here, ya
know, the two of us. In your experience with women, are they all
such nuts about salad, about vegetables?"

—
40 —

"I get half," said Clem Sanders.

It was Monday lunchtime, and they were
sitting in his office at the Treasure Museum. The office was a big
room with barred windows, lined with glass display cases filled
with old coins, ancient jewelry, corroded pistols, pieces of silver
robbed of their luster and fused together by salt water and time so
that they resembled crude models of the atom. Behind Clem Sanders's
chair was a wall covered with photographs of himself outsmiling
various dignitaries and local celebrities, none of whom Joey
recognized.

"Come on, Clem," said Zack Davidson, "take a
quarter. It's not like you really have to go hunting. Joey here can
pretty much pinpoint the spot for you."

Sanders folded his hands as if in prayer and
cocked his head at the sympathetic angle an undertaker or a
southern politician strikes when he is about to tell you he wishes
to God there were more he could do for you, but there isn't. His
face was deeply lined and seemed sunburned right down to the bone,
just slightly redder than the color of dark-meat chicken. The
pigment seemed to have been bleached out of his blue eyes, leaving
them pale as hospital paint. He wore a green jumpsuit open at the
neck, and nestled in his gray chest hair was a Spanish doubloon on
a leather string. His hands were huge and crinkled, his voice a
honeyed drawl fashioned for coaxing funds out of greedy but
skeptical investors. " 'Taint the huntin' that's involved," he said
gently. "It's the precedent."

Joey spoke not to him but to Zack. "It's too
much. I wanted to keep it local, but we're gonna hafta shop it in
Miami."

He started to rise, and as he did so, the
neatly rolled nautical chart that had been laid across his lap
rustled with a crisp sound like new-printed money. Clem Sanders
could not pull his eyes away from the precious tube of paper. He
squinted as if trying to pierce it with his gaze, to locate the
treasure that, in his view and under the law, was as much his as
anybody else's. "Now hol' on a minute," he purred. "I didn't say we
couldn't negotiate."

"So negotiate," said Joey. He sat back down
but stayed near the edge of the seat.

Sanders tugged absently at the doubloon
around his neck. "If it's like you say, if you've got the location,
then I s'pose I could live with sixty-forty."

Joey frowned. "Clem, you know what I do for
a living, right? I stand out onna street corner and I give people a
pitch to go see Parrot Beach. One a the things I tell 'em, I say,
free passes to the Treasure Museum, Clem Sanders, greatest
treasure hunter of all time."

"Thank you kindly."

"Yeah, well, I'm not sayin' I believe it,
I'm sayin' it's parta my pitch. But hey, if it's true, it's gonna
take you half a day to do this job. Maybe less. Are you gonna tell
me you won't take a million dollars for three, four hours' work?
I'm willing to cut you in for a third, no more."

Sanders looked at the ceiling, then exhaled
past lips that were permanently cracked and crevassed by the sun.
He glanced at Zack, fingered his doubloon, then lightly slapped his
desk. "Shoot—why not? You got a deal."

Now, Joey had been an observer at certain
low-level sit-downs in New York. The people running those meetings
had been observers at midlevel sit-downs, and the people running
the midlevel gatherings had been present at certain congresses of
the big boys. What filtered down from the top was a style based on
rigorous restraint. One did not show emotion at the striking of a
bargain. It was unmanly to smile, dangerous to gloat. So Joey kept
his face and voice as neutral as he could.

"Good," he said, watching light stream
through the barred windows of the treasure room. "Now there's just
a couple other things. We're partners, I'm gonna be totally up
front, 'cause I don't want any headaches after. These emeralds, the
way they got there, it's not, like, totally—"

Clem Sanders held an enormous pink palm in
Joey's face as if fending off the evil eye or some terrible
contagion, and at the same time he let out a deep defensive noise:
Bup, bup, bup, BUPPPP.

"Hol' on," he said. "I don' need to know, I
don' wanna know, and besides, hit don't make no difference. No
difference a'tall."

"None?" asked Zack, with a lifted eyebrow.
Still hovering between salesmanship and crime, his voice hinted at
a secret disappointment that he wasn't well on his way to
outlawhood.

"None," purred Clem. "By law. The ocean,
gents, it's like a baptism. Cleans away everything. Old secrets,
old errors, old sins. All gone. Stick somethin' in the ocean"—he
cupped his hands, then slowly lifted them in a sacramental gesture
as of rising from murky depths into the virginal light of day—"it
comes out reborn."

At this, despite his best efforts to remain
becomingly stone-faced, Joey could not help smiling. Innocent
emeralds. Free of the taint of Gino. Cleansed of the reek of Mount
Trashmore. Redeemed from the horror of fleeing rodents and the
threat of getting whacked. Or so he needed to believe.

"That's terrific," Joey said. "But listen.
You don't wanna know the reasons why, that's fine. But ya gotta
understand it's very important that everything is out innee open
heah. Ya know, like public, so people can see it's onnee up and
up."

Now it was Clem Sanders's turn to blow the
stoic act. He grinned and in fact could not help chuckling. Not for
nothing was he widely regarded as Key West's most undaunted
self-promoter. "Son," he said, "this is gonna be the most public
damn thing you ever saw. Everything I
do
is public. First
off, if I'm goin' out, I call the papers, tease 'em along. Then I
get the cable people. Plus I got friends at the networks. They'll
send crews down from Miami 'cause they know I'll deliver, I'll come
cruisin' in in time for the midday news, twelve o'clock local
edition. If there's a find, I radio right away, the coast guard
sends boats, sometimes helicopters, guardian angels like, to hover
over us. Every cop in Key West meets us at the dock. City cops.
County cops. State cops. Marine cops. Fuckin' IRS is there. The
mayor shows up to get his picture taken with me. Then we all hop
into armored cars and ride in a televised motorcade straight into
the bank vault. That public enough for you?"

Joey nodded, savoring a moment of perfect
contentment as he imagined Charlie Ponte's thugs, their almost
matching blue suits soaked with sweat, their hemorrhoids on fire
from endless weeks of sitting in the car, leaning against the hoods
of their Lincolns and watching helplessly as an army of police
brought their boss's emeralds to the bank.